"Textual Note on Shakespeare's The Tempest for the Oxford World Classics Reprint of the New Oxford Shakespeare Edition Edited By Rory Loughnane and Introduced By Lauren Working" by Gabriel Egan

The Tempest was first printed as the opening play in the Folio collection of 36 Shakespeare plays published in 1623. Shakespeare's sources included an unpublished account of the shipwreck at Bermuda of the ship the Sea Venture as it sailed to resupply the Virginia colony in 1609. The play was written in 1610 or 1611, towards the end of Shakespeare's career, and it was probably the last play he wrote on his own. (He went on to write The History of Cardenio, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen as collaborations with John Fletcher.)

The Folio text is our only authority for the script of The Tempest. Being the first play in the book, it would have been especially noticeable to readers and bookshop browsers, which is probably why the text is particularly well-presented with few errors and with Latin-language act- and scene-interval markers and particularly full stage directions. The numbered scene markers and elaborated stage directions appear to be the work of the scribe Ralph Crane who was commissioned to copy several of the King's Men's plays for use in the printing of the Folio, and it is likely that the additional wording in some stage directions reflects Crane's own recollections of the play in performance.

Crane's idiosyncrasies of writing, including overuse of brackets and hyphens, are visible in the Folio text of The Tempest but do not harm the sense, and there are few verbal difficulties to puzzle editors. Unfortunately, as Crane copied the play he imposed the habit from classical drama of naming in the first stage direction of each scene all the characters in the scene rather than giving the characters who enter mid-scene their individual entrances. These so-called 'massed entrances' in The Tempest and other Folio plays for which Crane provided the manuscripts sometimes leave it uncertain as to when particular characters enter to an ongoing scene.

Gender and race politics intersect with the play's textual condition. At 1.2.351-362, Miranda calls Caliban an 'Abhorrèd slave', a 'savage', who is 'brutish', and of a 'vile race', deserving only 'prison'. Generations of editors have thought this speech unladylike (and, more recently, racist) and reassigned it to Prospero. Likewise, whether Ferdinand calls Prospero a 'wise' father-in-law or Miranda a wondrous 'wife' at 4.1.123 also shapes our sense of the play's politics.

After the play's Epilogue, the Folio prints a list of the 'Names of the Actors', meaning the characters of the play, each given a brief description, and records that 'The scene', meaning the setting or location, is 'an uninhabited island'. Five other plays in the 1623 Folio have such lists of parts: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale, 2 Henry IV, and Timon of Athens. Crane made the transcripts from which the first three of these plays were printed and may have been responsible for creating the character lists. The songs 'Full fathom five' and 'Where the bee sucks' survive in seventeenth-century scores, recording the original music composed by Robert Johnson.